AADMD Lifetime Achievement Award 2010

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF DEVELOPMENTAL MEDICINE AND DENTISTRY
in recognition of his contribution in promoting and advancing oral health care
to the "Special Needs Community" awards to
Dr. Barry Waldman
The AADMD Lifetime Achievement Award
2010
"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."

Dr. H. Barry Waldman was raised in western Long Island, New York (some people persist on calling it Brooklyn). He completed his College (1955) and Dental School (1958) training at New York University in an era when dentistry was a burden to the patient and the dentist. In his early years in the profession he felt that it was necessary to eliminate all the old people who remembered the slow pulley driven drills from that time. (bad karma). He spent two years in the Navy learning to do "real dentistry" in a modern era. It was then (in 1960) that he enrolled at Columbia University in a pediatric dentistry program supported by a Cerebral Palsy grant that he learned there really were youngsters and older folks with an unbelievable range of disabilities and needed dental care. He never heard about it in dental school. This was followed by a Master's program in Public Health at Columbia University. (1963) He married and it was time for a job (his wife and father so advised). He took up a position directing a dental program for homebound patients at their homes, community residences and nursing homes in the metropolitan Cleveland, Ohio area, while teaching at Western Reserve (later to become Case Western Reserve). (His two children have never forgiven him as they were born in Cleveland – but the five grandchildren sort of made it worthwhile.) At Western Reserve he initiated one of the first programs in dental public health in dental schools in the country. While the portable equipment was rudimentary in the early 1960s, the more than a thousand patients who received the care and the hundreds of students who were trained to provide services represented an early phalanx of efforts to provide health services to individuals with disabilities who reside in our communities. It was during these years that he began his almost fifty years of international and national monographs and publications (reaching more than 900 items in number in 2010 – including more than 200 publications regarding the special needs of individuals with disabilities). In 1967 he enrolled in the University of Michigan for a doctoral degree in Medical Care Organization, a PhD program in health system analysis. It was in 1970, he found his “career home” when he became the first faculty member of the new dental school at Stony Brook University back on Long Island (this time further east on the Island). He served as Dean for Students and Department Chairman for twenty-five years and rose to the prestigious rank of Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is completing his fortieth year of teaching at the dental school and throughout the college and the health sciences center, including medicine, nursing, social welfare and health technology and management schools. He is the only professor of sociology at Stony Brook who never took a course in the subject. Nevertheless, he has taught courses in that department since 1972. In all, he has been involved in the educational programs of more than 8,000 students with the added effort of advisement and assistance of hundreds of students seeking careers in the health professions. In cooperation with Special Olympics, he initiated the effort which successfully modified the accreditation of all U.S. dental and dental hygiene schools to require programs to prepare graduates to provide oral health care to individuals with special health care needs. Despite his reaching the “advanced” age of 75 years, he comments that he does not anticipate “early retirement”, or “going gentle into that good night.”